“Submarines in the desert” (as my deepest gratitude to you)

ForewordI have been thinking about writing this post for several months now. But in a world were everything coming from the heart is misconstrued as some form of posturing, I was frankly afraid to do so. Also, writing that kind of stuff is not what bloggers do, much less so those who try to run a halfway credible blog. And yet, every time I got a kind email, a letter or even a gift, I felt that I have to write this. God knows I am opening myself up for even more misrepresentations as usual, but I think it is well worth it. My spiritual father always used to say “one soul is more precious than the entire universe“. So I dedicate this post to that one soul.IntroductionMy life has been one of ups and downs. Early on, after a pretty nasty childhood, it went up, rather rapidly. Then came the “fall from (pseudo-) grace” and I lost my career. It is still too early to go into all the details, but let’s just say that I used to be associated with a “three letter outfit” whose existence was not well-known by the general public and which has since been disbanded. In my field, I got to the proverbial ‘top’ pretty early on, but soon the war in Bosnia began to open my eyes to many things I had never suspected before. Then I found out about two things which got me blacklisted in my own, putatively democratic, country: I found out that a group of people had uselessly been murdered as a result of the criminal incompetence of their superiors and I found out that one guy had taken a long jail sentence while all this superiors had managed to walk away from a crime they all had committed. And even though I never went public, or even told my closest friends about it (to protect them), I was blacklisted and prevented from ever working again.In those dark days my wonderful wife was always trying to tell me that it was not my fault, that I had never done anything wrong, that I was paying the price for being a person of integrity and that I had proven many times over how good I was in my field. I always used to bitterly reply to her that I was like a “submarine in a desert”: maybe very good at “something somewhere”, but useless in my current environment (I always used to visualize a Akula-class SSN stranded smack in the middle of the Sahara desert – what a sight that would be! I wish somebody would use a Photoshop-like software to create that pic). What I have found out since, is that our planet is covered with deserts and that there are many, many submarines in them, all yearning for the vastness of an ocean.Modest beginnings at firstI came to the USA in 2002 with only one desire: to leave my past on the other side of the ocean and to disappear, to become an anonymous ‘nobody’ who would be left alone. More than anything else, I needed time to recover, to lick my wounds and to spend time with the only people who had stood by my without every doubting me: my wife and my kids.The French have a very good saying:”chassez le naturel et il revient au galop” which can roughly be translated as “try to suppress your nature, and it will come back with a vengeance”. This is what happened to me. While in 2002 I had promised myself to never analyze anything more complicated that a fiction book, by 2007 I suddenly decided to start a blog. This blog. My goal? Very, very primitive: to write whatever the hell I wanted. I had spent so many years writing for “big people” who had very narrow limits of what they were willing to read that I decided to indulge in the joy of writing whatever I wanted with no concern or regard for anybody’s opinion. I had an itch to scratch I decided to scratch it.

You can still parse the archives of 2007 or 2008 and you will see that I really was making no efforts to reach anybody, make a difference or become popular. A short and ill-fated contact with Antiwar.com (which ended up in disaster), gave me a few more readers but my readership was still tiny.My choice of topics did not help. Years before, I had literally “bumped” into the topic of Hezbollah and, my curiosity picked, I spent a decade studying this movement and its amazing leader. By 2007 I was an unrepentant Hezbollah-groupie and Nasrallah fanboy and most of the blog dealt with the Middle-East. The other topic was Russia, simply because this was the country my family came from and which I had professionally analyzed for years. As for the Ukraine, I don’t think that I ever mentioned it at all. While I was disgusted with the ignorance and hatefulness of Ukrainian nationalists, I did not care about the Ukraine: “let them soak in their own ‘independent’ and yet pathetic and clearly sinking statelet if they want – I have more inspiring things to look at” was my philosophy at the time. Sure, I kept an eye on events there, but to me this reminded me of Russia in 1993 – I was disgusted with all the actors and with the entire situation. Besides, what could happen there which would be worthy of interest?And sure enough, life proved me wrong (-: again :-)The big wars of 2013First, there was Syria and the Russian role in stopping Uncle Sam. Oh yes, there were the political efforts of the Russian diplomats, and they were ‘bad’ enough. But less noticed what the fact that Russia sent a hastily assembled but capable naval task force to the Syrian coast. Not a task force big enough to fight the US Navy, but a task force capable of providing a full view of the skies over and beyond Syria to the Syrian military. In other words, for the first time the US could not achieve a surprise attack on Syria, not with cruise missiles, not with airpower. Worse, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah embarked on a covert and overt program of material and technical assistance for Syria which ended up defeating the Wahabi insurgency. The AngloZionist were absolutely *livid*. So to teach Putin and those damn Russkies a good lesson, they blew up the Ukraine and, again, Putin did two things they had never expected and which they could never forgive: he did sent forces Crimea but he did not do so in Novorussia: there he helped covertly. There was no doubt possible: Russia had committed the “Crime of Crimes” of openly defying the will of our planetary overlords. The Empire’s response was predictable: a full-spectrum ‘war’ on Russia and Putin, albeit not an overtly military one (yet).For me and my blog, the consequence of this mega-crisis was immediate: the readership literally exploded and, at the suggestion of other (it was not even my idea!), more Saker blogs suddenly began popping up. From a unknown one man anonymous blog the Saker blog morphed into a global community, and that over less than one year.[Sidebar: if often fell like a war profiteer. The worse the situation in the Ukraine, the more readers I get, the calmer, the less. On a really quiet day I get as little as 20’000 hits, on a really bad day, up to 69’000. I estimate my more or less regular readership at no more than 30’000] I am outlining all this to truthfully explain to you that this was never the plan for me. Not only was this completely unplanned, it even took me by surprise. In fact, I was so surprised that I could not honestly make sense of it. Think of it.Here is a one-man blog, written by some anonymous dude with a silly alias, who repeatedly engages in all sorts of crimethink (like the day when I wrote – to a mainly Arab readership – that I believed that Hamas ought to unconditionally release Gilad Shalit, LOL!) who is neither from the Left, nor from the Right, whose writing is chock full of typos and, frankly, very poorly written sentences and yet this blog suddenly takes off like a rocket. And you can tell by my writing style that I don’t even take myself too seriously. But so what in the world has happened here?Sure, I am a decent analyst, I know Russian and a few other languages, I have studied Russia for all my life and the Middle-East for, well, a little over a decade. This is not bad, but hardly a reason for such a success.Then I understood:It was never about me, but always about youAlong with more daily visitors, I began receiving more and more emails and letters. And presents. Often very touching ones. Just look at the absolutely beautiful drawing of a Saker Falcon I got yesterday (thanks SO MUCH “S.T.”! I will frame and posted it on my wall)

People who had never met me and who really knew nothing about me were literally pouring kindness over me. Most emails and letter centered on political issues, but a big minority were expressing much deeper feelings such as gratitude and a desire to morally support. I was amazed, really. Then my readers began suggesting that I should place a donation button on the blog. Many may not believe me here, but that idea had never even crossed my mind. Eventually, I did (God knows I needed the money) and to my absolute amazement people began donating. Why? Why would anybody in our cynical word filled with crooks donate some hard earned and always scarce money to a guy he/she has never met? Was that just because I was posting materials about Syria or the Ukraine? Or my oh-so-good analyses? Hardly.And then there was also the rage. Many, many letters were literally oozing with rage. Rage against the government, its media, the Empire, the lies and the dishonesty. Rage at having been lied to. Rage at the humiliation of being treated like a serf or a slave. Rage at our dysfunctional and self-destructive society. Before that, I had no idea that so many people were so mad.The most gut-wrenching letters were often from US servicemen. They often began with “I consider myself a patriotic American and I love my country which I served for many years in the military but….” and here it inevitably turned into a painful admission that this country was lead by evil crooks, occupied by parasites, owned by a 1% of SOB whom everybody else despises. And you would simply not believe the kind of stuff these correspondents, including former servicemen, would write about Putin. It was amazing – I regularly joke that if given a chance to run, Putin might be elected as President of the US of A.[Sidebar: By the way, I will not post these letters here. Not even excepts. First, I want to protect the trust of those who wrote to me. Second, some of these letters are so amazing and moving that I will inevitably be accused of making them up. So I will simply forgo presenting any ‘proof’ for my statements. Believe me or not – makes no difference to me. And if you don’t – then I guess that yours is not the soul I dedicate this post to anyway]So there I was trying to figure out – why such an outpouring of kindness for a total stranger (and an anonymous one at that!) and such an outpouring of rage against the society we live in. And then, I think that I figured it out.The deserts are filled with submarines (but they are breaking free!)

That’s it. I had mistakenly believed that I was the only one feeling like a submarine in a desert, but in reality the deserts of our society were filled with people who felt completely alienated. Several times in the past I posted here the beautiful song by David Rovics “We are everywhere” because with each passing month I began to realize that he was literally right – we are, indeed, everywhere.What society had done to me – made me completely powerless – it has also done to you. And just the way it had made me feel like a single lonely nutcase, it made you feel like you were the only one. I most sincerely believe that the real reason for the success of this blog, its global community, its vibrant discussions and the amazing outpouring of kindness towards me is in the following simple fact: I inadvertently made it possible for many thousands of people to realize they they were not alone, not crazy, not wrong but that quite literally “we are everywhere”!The second thing that I did, again quite inadvertently, is to empower those who felt powerless to do something, to make a change, to really have an impact.Our societies are designed to make us feel like prison inmates, serfs or slaves. We all know that voting is a useless joke, that our rulers don’t give a damn about us, that political dissent is frowned on when it is real, that revolts are crushed in violence, that pluralism is viciously repressed by the prevailing ideology, that our schools brainwash and stupidify our kids and turn them against us, that the home brainwashing appliances like the Idiot-Tube, the radio or the papers are here to do only three things: entertain us, get our money and zombify us. We know that, but we feel powerless to do anything about it.By asking for help in my work on the blog and, especially, by allowing for what I call “spontaneous self-organization” (something which I had directly taken from how the Debian community functions) I had given those who shared my goals a readily available means to take action. And I have to say that the result exceeded my expectations by many order of magnitude (and made me realize that some “amateurs” are at least as good as, or better, then “pros”). Treat people with respect, give them a chance, and they will do miracles for you!

[Sidebar: if you are interested in how big complex projects can self-organize, please read – online – chapter 2.4 “The Debian Community” pp 46-57 in this book. Of course, I did not deliberately try to copy the Debian model, but I did apply the “just do it” principle and I let each Saker Blog self-organize in a completely independent manner. I also see my own role in the Saker community as one of a “benevolent dictator“, another free software phenomenon, though, so far, I have only had to act in this capacity once].Thanks to my inadvertently stumbling into the fantastic and yet untapped potential of so many good people our community began to grow almost spontaneously (several Saker Blog Team Leaders have also expressed to me the same amazement I was feeling).Suddenly many “submarines” had found their oceans to show what they were really capable off!Do you know about the Asch conformity experiment? [If not, take a quick look here before reading on]. Well, I think that my oppositional-defiant personality inadvertently crashed at least part of the gigantic Asch conformity experiment our society has become. I was calling it as I was seeing it and to hell with the consequences (I had so few readers anyways…). Then, in 2010 I decided to really give a good kick into the sandcastle of our delusions and posted an article entitled “Why am I not hearing the endless rumble of jaws dropping to the floor?”. In this post I basically repeated something which anybody could verify and which was undeniable: NIST had, by direct implication, admitted that WTC7 had been brought down by controlled demolition. Furthermore, and contrary to popular belief, NIST has simply no explanation at all for how the WTC1 and WTC2 had fallen. And yet, this amazing fact was completely obfuscated by the collective Asch experiment being imposed on us. But the reality is that the 911 issue is just a tip of an iceberg. Our entire society is one big, long and neverending Asch experiment and most of us, at least on some level, know about it. We all feel what the Matrix series calls the feeling like a “splinter in our mind”.I suppose that for types like myself (disrespectful of social dogmas and norms, oppositional and defiant towards authority, rebellious and aggressive by nature, deeply contrarian on an almost knee-jerk level, libertarian in outlook) the outcome of the tension between what I feel and what I am told to feel results in a long battle against the established order and dominant ideology (no wonder another two of my favorite songs of David Rovics are “Burn it down” and “We will shut them down“). But once a bad guy like myself decided to yank the splinter out of my mind – others decided to give it a try too and that is how it all began.My gratitude to youAnd here is what I wanted to say through all of the above: I know that I personally do not deserve such kindness and gratitude. In reality, the very fact that you have shown me so much kindness also shows that you are truly the one deserving gratitude and praise. I am just the very very lucky one – you are the kind and generous one. And, please believe me, this has nothing to do with me engaging in some kind of false modesty – I truly believe it, this is the conclusion I have come to from your letter and your emails.

In conclusion, I want to share a special song with all those of your who have “poured out their souls to me” (Russian expression). It is from the Russian bard Vladimir Vyssotskii and it is called “Song of the Earth”:Here are the lyrics (translated by George Tokarev)

Is the earth, as they say, burnt and dried?
Will a seed, as they say, never sprout?
Has the earth, as they say, really died?
No! It’s taken a lengthy time-out!
Mother Earth will forever give birth,
Its maternity isn’t a fiction!
Don’t believe that they burnt down the earth,
No! It’s blackened from grief and affliction.
Trenches, running like scars back and forth...
Bleeding guts black shell-craters expose...
They are open nerves of the earth,
Which unearthly unhappiness knows.
It will stand wars and grief - any thing!
It’s not crippled, though booted and looted...
Don’t believe that the earth doesn’t sing,
That it’s quieted down, diluted!
No, it’s singing as loud as it can
From a trench, from a wound, from a hole!
Since the earth is the soul of Man,
Boots cannot trample down the soul!

This last sentence, “boot cannot trample down the soul!”, speaks, I believe, not only of physical boots, though these are also meant, but also about psychological, ideological, social boots who, no less than the real thing, try hard to trample down on our souls.Remember the last sentence of Orwell’s 1984? “He loved Big Brother”. I always absolutely hated that sentence. Yes, for the purpose of the book, this was the correct ending being, as it was, a warning. But I always though “hell, no I will always hate Big Brother”, “boots cannot trample down souls”.What you all, my friends, have proven to me is that there are many of us who will not love Big Brother and that Big Brother has not trampled down our souls. 20 years ago I used to feel like the most lonely man on the planet. Now, thanks to you, I feel like we are everywhere and I have friend, free fellow humans, all over the planet.And for that you have my eternal and most heartfelt gratitude,The SakerPS: note to the Saker-haters: I am fully aware of how easy it is to distort and “rephrase in other words” what I wrote above, and how many ugly and nasty conclusions you can come up with. At the very least, you will call me either a hypocrite or delusional. Fine. You have shown me over and over again that this is a price to pay for honesty. I did not try to make this text slander-proof and if you want to use that to trash me further – fine. I just want you to know that I accept that and that I don’t fear you one bit :-p

December 2015 addendum from the Saker:

[Note: I decided to post this addendum following the events described here]

I consider that the “Submarine in the desert” text above really says everything relevant about me. I also believe that you can tell a tree by its fruits – so my blog is really what people ought to judge me by. However, since others apparently want to know a little more about my past life, I can add the following:

I was born in Zurich, Switzerland, from a Dutch father and Russian mother. My father left us when I was 5, so my mother and my Russian family raised me and this is why I took my mother’s last name. I lived most of my life in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1984 I did my military service in electronic warfare and I was later transferred to the military intelligence service (UNA) as a language specialist where did some work with the Swiss Air Force. I then traveled to the USA where I got a BA in International Relations from the School of International Service (SIS) at the American University and a MA in Strategic Studies from the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at the Johns Hopkins University. Upon my return to Switzerland, I worked as a civilian consultant for the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service (SND) writing strategic analyses, primarily about the Soviet/Russian military. In the military, I was given the Major-equivalent rank of “Technical Officer”, which is a fancy way of saying that I was an analyst. I also worked as an “enemy operations” (“Red Team” in US parlance) specialist for the operational-level training of the General Staff of Swiss armed forces. I then accepted a position for the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) where I specialized in peacekeeping tactics and operations. This gave me the opportunity to co-author a book on Russian peacekeeping operations with the Major-General I. N. Vorob’ev, of the Russian General Staff Academy. My last work at UNIDIR was about psychological operations and intelligence in peacekeeping which can be downloaded here. At the same time, I also wrote an evaluation of the performance of the Russian military during the first Chechen war for the Journal of Slavic Military Studies which somebody has since uploaded here. The wars in Bosnia and Chechnia really opened my eyes to the real nature of the Empire. Since I thought that I was living in a democracy, I did voice my opinion on these topics and I soon ended up being viewed with suspicion by my former bosses. I quit the UN and took up a position at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) which was probably the worst mistake of my life and which I shall never discuss publicly. By the time I got out of that job, I was basically blacklisted as a “dangerous element” (meaning “disloyal”) by my former bosses (my regular contacts with Russian diplomats and my efforts at providing aid to the Bosnian Serbs probably did not help). In total disgust, I abandoned my career as a military specialist and re-trained as a software engineer. When 9/11 crashed the IT sector I was unemployed again and I left Switzerland for the USA where I homeschooled our 3 children while doing odd jobs, mostly as a translator (I am fluent in Russian, French, English, Spanish and German) while my wife worked as a veterinarian (now, that our kids have grown up, my wife and I work together). In 2007 I decided to start an anonymous blog, mainly as a psychotherapy for myself, and I called it “Vineyard Saker” – a simple machine-generated anagram of my full name :-)

Finally, and just for the record, a few points: I never did any intelligence gathering for anybody, though I was approached by the Americans, the Russians and the Swiss do to exactly that, but I turned them all down (just not my cup of tea at all). While my maternal family are all from the Russian nobility, my Dutch DNA is 100% proletarian, and I am quite happy with that mix. To my great regret, I get no help from Russia at all – not money, not information (I would *love* to be a paid “Putin agent” but VVP has not made any offers yet). All my info is 100% “open source”. My past experience with classified data tells me that it is either highly technical or time-critical but not otherwise better than open source information: 80% of all the good info is out there, in the open, it is just a matter of putting it together correctly. I get a regular trickle of donations from the blog, but nothing major, and only 2 private donors (thanks guys!!) provide most of it anyway. If making money was my big goal, then I assure you that I had plenty of much better opportunities. My main objective in the immediate future is to (finally) write my thesis for the graduate degree in patristic theology I am working on now, and to set some money aside to visit Russia again (which I have not done since 1996!). Oh, and if you still wonder, no, I am not a Muslim nor am I on any Muslim (or other) payroll.

I am a “proud card carrying member” of the FSF, EFF, the NRA and the GOA (yes, I like my freedoms, I even joined the ACLU until they became obsessed with so-called “gay rights”). Political Compass (https://www.politicalcompass.org/) scores me as a “Left Libertarian”:

Personally, I reject the Left-Right reference system and consider myself an Orthodox “People’s Monarchist” (народный монархист) in the tradition of Lev Tikhomirov, Feodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Solonevich and Ivan Ilyin. Just like the Russian philosopher Berdaev, rather than looking left or right, I rather look *up*!

I also recognize myself in the notion of “Left of labor, Right of values” (Gauche du travail, droite des valeurs) of Alain Soral. My economics are: laissez-faire capitalism for the family and small business level, socialism for the corporation level and communism for strategic/national level sectors of the economy.

I have over 40 years of freediving experience (which I began long before the Big Blue movie made that lifestyle popular), but now, at 52, I mostly kayak and hike the Florida wilderness.

—

Now that I wrote all of the above, I still think that it is largely irrelevant. Judge me not by what I say about myself, but by my blog or, better, my book. All of the above is true, but these are my *external life circumstances* and they do not say much about who I really *am*. My writings do. Study them (if so inclined) and you will know who I am.

The Saker

The Essential Saker II: Civilizational Choices and Geopolitics / The Russian challenge to the hegemony of the AngloZionist Empire

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It’s a patriarchal method of control as so many of these things are. The Buddha was quite specific.

Second although Debian is nice and certainly copied a lot some of us worship at “Church of the Subgenius” and Bob has made it clear that Slackware is the one true way. SysV … really, have you no shame?

The Budha was quite specific ? A retired Indian businessman who in 500BC set off to teach semi-savages to respect the elder and others. Whose followers made-up his ideas into into a hodge podge of nonsense.. with reincarnationinto a rat or cow, or angry ghost or host of other idiocies.. Whose followers chant in a tongue unknown to them to sometimes naked, sometimes obese statues in gaudy gold, red and blue buildings and then.. go right out and kill.(Burma) loot, burn steal lie and rape. (The rest). Iknow I live in one of the those countries.

And in any case he wasn’t in the true line of the Nokodemion prophets, Jeremiah, Enoch, etc. then Jmmanuel who in 159AD was renamed JC, Mohammed, (whose Creational teachings were completely falsified), Galileo, who moved us forward on science not the creational Laws, (the optics for his telescope were based on formulas not worked out for another 200 years).. and today BEAM in Switzerland of whom only about 4 million are aware. http://www.theyfly.com.

PenGun, I found the biographical credentials of the Saker absolutely believable (I know you are not questioning them). Because of his Russian background, the Russian authors he reads, his moral inclinations and the special significance of ‘soul’ in Russia and Russian literature, there has to be such a thing as a soul.

I have a Buddhist friend and think I know where you are coming from but you cannot be Russian and not have a soul. (You can be American and not have a soul. I could name a few). If Russians did not have souls Gogol could never have written “Dead Souls”. And he could not have had the dead soul Akaki searching St. Petersburg looking for his overcoat. Even the so-called nihilist, George Ivanov (1894-1958) had a soul, and believed.Yes, you cannot be Russian and not believe in the existence of the soul.

When you are born, you have a soul. But as you live your life, for most, your soul whithers but does not die. It hides. Life progresses, whether or not you you realise your soul’s moribund state. At some point in your life you might sense this lack of the presence of your soul, and that is your salvation, your inner peace. You start to see the falsities of life as presented to you by others, and in rejecting those ideas and that way of life, you start to regenerate your soul and live again.

Lets not be silly about this. Surely there are as many “Russias” as there are “Americas”. You are talking about a mass of people, boiling in the stew of life, not a few political animals that dress in the flags to further their own will to power and will to money. And yes, even there, as everywhere, there are people without a heart, without a soul, without empathy. It is the nature of the beast to be thus, and only the sophistication of culture over millennia has given the human beast the thin veneer of rationality some of its member wear.

First, I salute you and your efforts. You often put to words the realities which torment me. I am not a young man, have been part of the anti-war movement since the sixties, however I am not a complete pacifist and realize there are times when violent reaction is necessary though a last resort; especially when your family, friends and rights are violated by the many who have embraced inhumanity and evil. I now see a world where morality, respect for humanity and compassion is being eliminated. So I will get to the point. You utilize the word “libertarian” often. I ask, in what sense do you use the term? Many in the US who consider themselves to be libertarians, Randians, follow an ideology devoid of compassion for those below their respective status or stature. Who blame the victim. Who believe the fault lies with laziness and a sense of entitlement. Who see government as an absolute evil. Who preach survival of the fittest, social Darwinism. Yet when they are confronted or are put in harms way by those they consider leaches look for protection from the very institutions they rant against. I find most who believe so a bunch of spineless jelly fish. Please define what you believe the word means.

As you know, with me, words have meaning and meaning is important to protect.

God, I wish we were all perfect when we write or speak, but it keeps us humble to discover otherwise.

I’ve been in ‘editing’ mode for months on my books, and it is indeed humbling to have no one to blame for my errata. And I’m on my third round. The eye tricks, the mind tricks, and the software genie doesn’t catch it all either.

It must be hell to be literate in five or six languages. That is some burden, Saker.

Cheers Saker. Few days ago some documentary re something to do with the aluminum of the planes for the towers falling, the missing element or something???? Having only been following this site couple weeks ago, what drew me was the intelligence I had ascertained from reading an article you had posted on Russia Insider.There is a desparate need to make sense of a nonsensical world, eg we knew there were no weapons of mass destruction.The world’s nonsense has to stop.Thanks to fellow commentators too.

Hello Saker.Gregoire here.One of the first comments I wanted to post when I came here was about how I became political aware. It was a long post and I tried to be honest (to myself too). I didn’t post it because it felt strange to post it to a “stranger”. But now I guess there were a lot of others with this need to connect.Funny to read about your reaction to “abundance”. But most people in this world are actually good people!

Hegel said that the best way to spread ignorance was to appeal to common knowledge. Since the ‘end of history’ a lot of huge unanswered questions have been treated as though they’ve been empirically resolved in a geo-political clean laboratory. It’s fantastic to deal with people who know that history hasn’t ended and that history doesn’t offer empirical results.

I came here via Asia Times which I’ve read religiously since 2002. Just about all right wing and left wing blogs/communities creep me out or have descended into wankery, respectively.

Personally I’ve been obsessed with Ukraine and Eurasian reintegration projects since the Orange Revolution.

I picked sides between native and white american cultures early in life, leading me to support almost any opposition to america and its ilk. There is no evil remotely comparable to the threat of Global Wall Street hegemony.

Being blacklisted is a great complement especially if as in poker you draw the royal flush.

In my own case the 2’s, 3’s and the 4’s, and some others – well I lived in interesting times – following the usual mix of sales pitches, get with the team, be a help to your “country”, be an “important” keeper of knowledge, be a good guy in a white hat, work with the brightest brains, have many used Uncle Bens if a local could “edit” my report which I “could” subsequently sign, nubile companions for these cold, cold winter nights – some even attempting oral sex as an interview test on susceptability to “persuasion”, and blah, blah, blah.

Fortunately carpentry was never my strong point, and sex without prior introduction not engaging.

Staying alive also carries a certain frisson and tones up the mind as well as the body.

Its also an adventure to be expelled from various countries.

In all 2’s, 3’s and 4’s you are deemed to be wrong from inception, how else will they keep the leverage?

Sometimes hits are arranged for leverage, like blooding in hunting – recent examples being in Ukraine but not exclusively.

Your current leverage is possibly “credit”, some of your local fine upstandings swear by that one.

As to “crime”, its a romantic notion not applicable to some; laws being for little people,the notion to obscure and simultaneously re-inforce the “power” of the big people – Diet Moroz/Father Christmas doesn’t exist, and “democracy” is an exercise on how many you can bamboozle how often and how, “representative democracy” greatly increasing the odds for the house as well as being an oxymoron.

Some even run a book on that one.

Evaluation needs a notion of purpose.

Knowledge can be parlayed but an observation without malice – your analysis is sometimes weak, but your understanding/formulation of strategy even weaker.

Conscious silence is a counter-intuitive skill to learn, as are contingent subsets.

An example, the key in 1984 is when Winston Smith says do it to her, the love Big Brother was unnecessary over extension which will likely end in tears – recognise anyone, any angles and any opportunities?

Standing to the side may help to see the ridiculousness within which naivete often has terminal outcomes, unless spiders are temporarily sated and decide to hold future prey in suspended animation.

Try to remember the Siberian joke.

Oleg: The Central Committee won’t like it.

Misha: What are they going to do; send us to Siberia – we are already there.

Lets see the responses if any, disbelief being a useful outcome, as will be all of the other potentials, even if some ask for peer reviewed references.

Dear Saker,I am breaking here a promise I made( to you and myself) to never comment again because I don’t have the means of sending anything to you(financially)so as NOT to steal of your time if anyway I can’t be of any assistance!But,Thank you for a most heart hitting piece !!!!!!You have felt alone for a long time in this horrible prison we are living.My sorrow as an arab expat is even greater,rage has given place to total alienation and rejection of all things connected with the West though I have a european husband,children and grand children.My biggest fear is that I will be one day put in a grave here in this horrible continent that has devastated humanity,debased the Word of God and made the whole planet a valley of tears..Sayed Hassan and his Party have been my light all these years.What would my grand father think as the Hezb has seen its birth in a village that was his long time ago?What pride did they give us all rising from poverty and oppression to become the ray of hope that make us all go foreword..Please continue your good work it is so much more important and vital as an analyst for the empire in your previous life.That is a true resurrection.BCH

That Saker picture is beautiful. If possible, this could be your blog logo. Because of the bird looking to the left and down it should be placed to the right and at the top.

Some of your posts, especially a recent one, picture you as a religious nutcase in my mind. But then, i know this cannot really be discussed. Everyones beliefs should to be accepted as fact of this persons existence and as long as i am left alone, i try not to care.

Why i am reading your articles often, apart from just information and some analysis and opinion is that you are honest and not bullshitting anyone (For those who don’t know ‘On Bullshit’ by Harry Frankfurt, here it is http://www.stoa.org.uk/topics/bullshit/pdf/on-bullshit.pdf. Also, some of the commentators expand with quality stuff to read and think about.

Dear Saker,as a man who works in science, i can tell you beyond any doubt, that conformity is almost the sole factor in framing what is called as scientific knowledge, but for the few rebels, unconformists of all times, which sadly enough, are very very few.

Aha, allow me to disagree: if you are receiving kindness, then maybe it is what you deserve.

Anyway, thank you dearly for putting up one more everywhere which has blended somehow to tens of thousands.

@yt:Some of your posts, especially a recent one, picture you as a religious nutcase in my mind

How could *any* Christian halfway worth his name *not* look as a nutcase to the world when Christ Himself said though His Apostles:

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God (…) but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles (…) For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.(…) But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. (…) The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit (…) We are fools for Christ, but you are so wise in Christ! We are weak, but you are strong! You are honored, we are dishonored! (…) You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.

The world, my friend, is not Ortho-compatible :-) Traditional Christianity, the real thing, not the modern decaffeinated ersatz, requires “folly” and even “extremism”. This is true of any religion taken seriously. Moderation is what is needed in a bowel movement (as my wife likes to say), in matters pertaining to God – passion, real all-consuming passion, is what is needed.

Show me a religious person who is not a nutcase to the world, and I will show you a fraud.

“Traditional Christianity, the real thing, not the modern decaffeinated ersatz, requires “folly” and even “extremism”…. Moderation is what is needed in a bowel movement… in matters pertaining to God – passion, real all-consuming passion, is what is needed. Show me a religious person who is not a nutcase to the world, and I will show you a fraud..”

That is great stuff, worthy of St Jerome, I’d say! I just came upon your website for the first time and I already feel a religious-moral-political-interpersonal bond with you taking shape. I look forward to reading more of what you have to say. May God and Our Blessed Mother guide and protect you and yours always.

@anonymous: My biggest fear is that I will be one day put in a grave here in this horrible continent

Dear friend, peace to you.

God created all continents and they are all equally beautiful and noble. The one you and I live in today, has known a horror which no other continent has ever experienced: a “pluri-genocide” as I call it. Here, it was not one ethnicity which was exterminated, but all the ethnicities of the continent. In that sense, this is a martyred land. Nowadays, this land is undergoing a terrible material decline, but in spiritual terms this has been a wasteland for much longer and the people living here have suffered immensely, even if, for a while, some of them had a house and two cars. Again, looks at the social, spiritual, intellectual and even physical condition of most of those living here and it is outright terrifying. So yes, what happened here has been – and still is – horrible, but this continent is not, and neither are its people. Consider yourself very fortunate to have a truly historical figure like Hassan Nasrallah as a political and spiritual leader, and have pity on those who are lead by Barak Obama and Billy Graham!

If indeed it will be God’s Will for you to be “one day put in a grave here” then think that your grave will be in very good company indeed, next to a land awash with innocent blood. Besides, what does it matter where you physical remains will rest as long as your soul returns to your Creator!

Finally, as a Muslim, what higher mission could you have beyond accepting God’s will with obedience and gratitude. This you can also do here and if you really do it with all your heart, this will make you a spiritual shahid, will it not?

People are attracted to your blog for various reasons. I had come to the conclusion that democracy is the US is a thin tissue of lies, and the true power is a clique that runs the 2 political parties and the press in the US. The pain of seeing all this unchallenged propaganda day after day made me seek out somebody with some reverence for the truth and fearless enough to pursue it, in the face of personal pain. You must be on guard though with your new found success, to be willing to bite even this generous hand from time to time in service to the truth. I try not become a camp follower myself.

@The Saker: “Show me a religious person who is not a nutcase to the world, and I will show you a fraud.”

Yes, all truly religious people in so called ‘developed countries’ look like nutcases to me, or in case they are less educated by the circumstances they live in (not much education to speak of apart from the knowledge and wisdom of their tribe – extreme example) they look just simple minded. Nothing wrong with that. These people are still living in their ancient religion or had their religion altered or replaced by invading religions (missionaries). In all cases though, real religious people are sincere in their beliefs.

Religious people see non-religious ones as being utterly wrong (and nutty, you tell me?) the same way it is the other way around. No way to change that.

What’s really funny in a way and strange to a non-religious person is how the different strains of one root-religion don’t seem to see the contradiction in ‘themself’, do not see their distorted mirror image being held in front of them. Everyone is ‘right’ in his religion, which of course makes everyone else, who differs, wrong.

Not intending to start a flame war here of course. We all have to live with each other, so just let’s agree not to impose our religion or non-religion on our neighbors.

The way I understand “the Holy Book”: Old Testament – Word of God release 1.0, New Testament – Word of God release 2.0, Koran – Word of God release 3.0. The newer releases seem to accept all the previous ones and their Prophets; This does not work in reverse. This would be merely interesting or silly, except for the murdering done in the name of the release version.

Dear Saker,your blog has opened the way for many to express or at least to unload themselves. The soul (even the souls of the tormented) cannot stand to the end the sea of lies and doom, it needs truth and honesty, otherwise it will drown. And, by the way, maybe the submarine in the desert ought be changed to a ‘voice in the desert’ who cries out loudly: straighten your ways, and make way for the Lord’ (just paraphrasing here).Maybe this is your role, God knows better.cheers,aviewer

@yt:Yes, all truly religious people in so called ‘developed countries’ look like nutcases to me, or in case they are less educated by the circumstances they live in (not much education to speak of apart from the knowledge and wisdom of their tribe – extreme example) they look just simple minded.

Bwahahahahaha!!! This is a pearl I might sent to my spiritual father (PhD, Princeton) or my thesis directors (more degrees that I care to count). Thanks for give me a good honest bellylaugh :-)

Cheers and tons of thanks,

The Saker

PS: come to think of it, my spiritual father might even agree with you :-)

Recent family dinner, (I was visiting home, I now live the other side of the world), such topics arose.My very bright 20 yr old niece then announced ‘I just want to be happy’ and there and then in front of my eyes I watched her replace that splinter and reattach to the matrix.Here I think lies the problem. The matrix is attractive and powerful to the many.Keep up the good work. With the G20 here in Oz, the disinformation in our Mainstream Media is at fever pitch!H

S.T., you are a great artist! That is a great raptor portrait. Hope it becomes a permanent part of the blog. It perfectly symbolizes how Saker expressed his feelings in this post: his deep gratitude to his readers and to the Good Lord who mysteriously led him to create the blog in the first place. The falcon bows its head.

there are some similarities between your life-story and mine. To me, the eye-opening moment was the period between Kosovo-war in 1999. and the events of 11th of September 2001. I became aware of the immense power of the Jewish lobby in the Western world. I felt very, very lonely then and many years afterwards.

Anyway, keep up the good job, and DO NOT underestimate your intellect! I first visited your blog last December on a recommendation from a friend, and it was your analytical capabilities that IMMEDIATELY made me a regular visitor here.

“whose writing is chock full of typos and, frankly, very poorly written sentences and yet this blog suddenly takes off like a rocket. And you can tell by my writing style that I don’t even take myself too seriously. But so what in the world has happened here?”

Disagreed. One of the reasons for me to read your blog is also the manner of writing. It is inspirational and intellectual. Your typos are present but not bothering.

What if you would take yourself much more seriously, as in you were completely focussed on giving the right analysis and expressed it so too. In the event that you were wrong once, what would happen? The completely serious writer made mistakes — should we still trust this blog? What I want to say is that one does not need complete seriousness here. In fact, like I do, I think people here would rather hear a knowledged person speak from his heart and feelings, after he analysed the matter.

You’re a Russian, and we’re people from around the world — except that we’re not Russians. Every word you speak would not have come to our minds, because your perspective of the situation is just this much different.

I am a 23 year-old student from the Netherlands. What do I know? Who must I ask to get to know the world? Certainly not the people with the good jobs and the good lives. There is one thing I am certain of: the people who bear the biggest loads, bear the biggest wisdom.

I am sure you are very aware that a person’s writing can easily communicate the finesse of his soul. Just by reading your posts, it was very quickly clear to me that you whilst you might have had certain biases and favourites in your commentaries, you never strayed away from your fundamental commitment to truth, fairness and human decency.

In the bizzaro-orweillian world we live in, it is truly refreshing and uplifting to witness another individual as myself crazy and defiant enough to utter, and utter loudly, that one plus one equals two.

You might be interested to know of (or perhaps already heard of him!) in another similar individual as yourself whose blog i also check up on daily at http://www.jimstonefreelance.com. Like you, he is also an independent journalist that runs on donations and even if a lot of his material is less ‘verifiable’, his fundamental commitment to truth and decency communicates itself through his writing

Religion, yupp, buttf…. and twisted to something way out of line in all sensess I can come up with.religion is basicly been a tool of political opression thrue milleniums and no religion is free of their own cluster f….. of their own faith.but to dragg this into a question about integrety and intelligence, is as far I will coment it, downright ignorant about the reality witch those that tryed to teach you, was about.You simply dont know it.Why waist time on ignorants, I am been feed up with strawman, ad homeniems and so on, regading virtually every f… aspect of debate we have and do sometimes ppartisipate in.

My God, is someting terrifying for some, a creatore that uphoding a system witch we are a simple part of.its not an gandalfian entety, its a force, that feeds upon us and gives us life, by the birth of an energetic entety called soul/free will. but our reality is something totaly different, and ours is just one, and we have realitys interwoven into eatch others, by the Creatore done by making it to a stairway.Masters, is those that have and is able to go thrue the weild, a force, cept in check by our very own consciousness or level of it, and have been to the other side. This ohter side isnt other “our world”, no, no, no, a childish misstake on parallel world narratives. No there is a multitute of worlds/realitys interwoven, we live in one level, restrained only by mind, and our inherent perseptions of reality attaced to this world/reality.ANd we are not alone.

And its here, we are sett to learn, gain wisdom as our life goes on, regadless of where and whatt we came here as. Thats what religion is about.To be able to learn about justice and truth, and above all, love.Respect everything, thread lightly, and love life above all, and the day you die, remeber this when you pray, you have nothing to be afraid of.

And good things do happend to good people, its true.our creatore gives us all a fleating window of poretunetys from time to time, its up to us our selfs to catch it, and dont be afraid to lett go.Learning comes after practising, expirience fuels wisdom.And love of life, fuels your soul.

When it comes to the corrupt elites who are currently running things, who I believe will go down a lot faster than most people think possible today, I bear in mind my favorite quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

“Don’t believe them, don’t fear them, don’t ask anything of them”

And these words of wisdom from an American Hindu spiritual leader:

“Dark beings and evil little people may seem at first sight to be powerful externally. That is only because their very existence is based upon illusion, upon a lie. Like the parasitic entities they truly are, such insignificant beings feed upon our very fear itself. The moment they realize, however, that there is zero reason to fear them, they run away screeching as fast as their tiny feet can take them. They are, and always were, nothing more than paper tigers. We can poke our finger right through them. Even the seemingly smallest of good people can render them into complete non-existence – effortlessly – because such evil little beings never had real existence to them to begin with. Know that the strength and the power is with you.” – Sri Dharma Pravartaka Acharya

Good words to live by as the New World Order crumbles into dust from its own iniquities and rotten nature.

Thanks Saker for the article. Apart from the emotional aspects, I think it’s also helpful to the cause, and thus the right decision to post it.

Chomsky also talked about this very phenomenon of the system turning every decent person opposing it into their own little lonely cell so they feel they are the only ones to think that way, hence powerless.

Coincidentally, Paul Craig Roberts just wrote an article preaching an approach opposite to yours (which I can also understand):

I’m not sure how appropriate it is to post this link but Im doing it, and perhaps it will touch ona few recent subjects. It’s to a video I made a couple of years that relate to religion, being alone, simply being, and so forth. http://vimeo.com/33813210

I’ve always been an ‘outsider’ and ‘stranger’ — I got used to it and found some great advantages with it. I also found that even if rare, one can always find someone who seems to agree with you (I say ‘seems to’ because sometimes you find out that someone who you thought was agreeing was following a path and narrative that was only parallel for a while and then broke away, and they were actually saying something much different from what you thought they were).

Whatever — ultimately we are all ‘alone’ and ‘I have always been behind these eyes’ as in the Pink Floyd song. The abstraction of ‘we’ can be quite deceptive, and worse to deal with than the abstraction of personal identity, although they are intertwined.

On the point of most of this blog, identification of ‘Russians’, ‘Novorossians”, ‘Ukranians’, and all the other collective words set serious traps in understanding if not understood as abstract and inherently inaccurate: reality is actually composed of everything, and all relationships which exist, whether we are aware of them or not. The only true expression of the universe is the universe itself. That, and our awareness or defining of it, is constantly emerging and changing.

But this is on a deep level, and none of this implies that everything is relative in the sense of perverted ‘post-modern’ blather, or outright lies, or that we can’t or should not, even if lacking absolute knowledge, make judgements or distinguish between that which have high confidence in and the mere speculative ‘anything is possible’ or ‘that’s my (uninformed) opinion’. Of course powerful Americans were part of the 9/11 conspiracy; that’s now clear.

Your two recent posts, “Submarines in the desert” and the one on “Sexually dysfunctional America”, are very, very significant ones. If people care to think through, they will realize that the common underlying theme is alienation: alienation in an age of hyper-industrialization that has divorced mankind from nature and natural emotions. I wish to make two points – throwing in a third one free of cost:1.) Regarding sexual dysfunction: Your readers who let loose howls of protest at your perceived “homophobia” are totally missing the point. Ensuring that gays and lesbians do not get persecuted is one thing; but then to demand that the 95% of the others must endorse and validate that minority choice as equally valid is something else. But even that is neither here nor there. The real question is why the media and the western states are pushing it so vigorously? An African country was recently refused a world bank loan unless it amended its laws. Over the past three-four decades, governments, helped by western “progressives” and western “liberals”, have pushed for all sorts of “progressive” laws and measures whose net effect is diminution of the family and the family’s sphere of control, to create atomized individuals who can be controlled more easily. The massive brainwashing and legal changes to foster gay acceptance are but one more instance. To 70% of the world’s hungry and destitute, all that the west has to offer is gay rights. As if turning gay would put food on the table for the hungry! Thus, human rights means to our western intellectuals but two things: bombing countries to advance the shining light of democracy and promotion of social initiatives like gay rights. The west is truly alienated and dysfunctional – intellectually, socially, in family-lives, morally, and in the sexual sphere. 2.) Serious talk of religion again brings out rants and obscenities from our “rational” atheists. It does not occur to them to ask themselves why they tend to froth at the mouth and lose control when discussing religion. Perhaps God exists, perhaps he doesn’t; but the western debate would like to slam the door shut. Call it an instance of dysfunctional brains!3.) There are indeed all sorts of dysfunctions today – proudly put on display as achievements by those most afflicted by them. Thus Madeleine Albright, when asked whether the death of half a million Iraqi children was a just price to pay for western sanctions, could sagely answer yes without any challenge. But that was minor news, relegated to the third or fourth pages. The headlines go to stuff such as: “Kim Kardishian bares behind first time” (Yahoo major news), “Kim Kardishian to go topless”. So if Putin sneezes, the western media headlines read “Putin emits germs, threatens bio-warfare” and if he gallantly drapes a blanket over the Chinese first lady, the media proclaims “Putin on the hit”.

Dear Saker, your surmise is correct: we are indeed living in an age where many feel alienated, like submarines in the desert. To those who say that the Saker should just blog on the empire’s latest war adventures, I would say: if you truly want to be set free, first realize how alienated you are and have been made so by those who rule your lives – economically, politically, in your choice of social mores, down to things like your personal sexuality.

If you are saying the general imbalance in the world with its extreme focus on the body and lust – I agree with you. However I can not help but read your comment to assume being gay as being about sex and not love. If you do not want the world to shoot itself in the foot with lost – if you agree we should spiritually (regardless of religious affiliations ) be kind and generous – then let’s not assume being gay is about a gay agenda but rather about the acceptance of love. Our systems are warped – let’s not be polluted by the real danger which is the seperation of things. Being gay does not exclude being spiritual or family oriented – don’t get lost in the patriarchys agenda – to each their own. We are one. If I am to respect your opinion and take you seriously I would say that I fear more the violence of men – gay or straight – we need to understand that there is a tremendous unbalance between the masculine and feminine and the violent world we have had to endure as women and mothers to daughters and sons – for the reason of rebalancing – I can understand more women’s lack of trust in men. Having to navigate a life of alienation where our bodies and minds being projected to have no value – I trust it is a sign that what is feared the most is what holds the most power for change.

I’m an American who loves my country, and I agree with almost everything you said and how you expressed it. As you can see, I am outnumbered here, although there are many millions like me.

God bless America and Russia. By America I mean the normal, peaceful, productive, non-bullying American nation, which demands respect but actually GIVES respect, which stays strong but never looks for excuses to use that military aggressively, etc.

I do NOT mean “our” government or perverse Hollywood “Industry” or crooked Manhattan bankers or “connected” “progressive” Silicon Valley corporate dictators, and the like.

Thoroughly agree with you about the destructive promotion of homosexuality. I’d suggest only that we not dignify that particular dead-end lifestyle with the propaganda term “gay.” We can be polite, never hateful, and simply use the neutral and accurate term homosexual.

To follow up on Omutad’s comment above, Saker, you should enter “Lexx Soundtrack – A Walk in the Desert” into the Youtube searchbox, and you will find a musical composition that perfectly conveys your feelings of isolation, desolation, and loneliness when you felt like a ‘submarine in the desert.’ The tune is also ominous and foreboding: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyKKjMSyhC0

When the Ukraine crisis hit the news I noticed the internet was engulfed with commenters who tried to shout down those who expressed opinions that reflected misgivings and doubts about the official line. Regular phrases were bandied about liberally, such as calling someone a “paid Putin stooge”, or variations thereof, an absurdity as though Putin was sending out envelopes with rubles in them. Another more common claim is that people are “useful idiots”, unwittingly being in the service of a foreign power. All this because people have the nerve to have opinions that haven’t been approved by the gatekeepers. Looking back on it I’d say that it was actually organized with a few people trying to give the false impression of there being large numbers of them. It wasn’t as spontaneous as they tried to make it seem. They’re out there trying to manipulate ideas on the internet and attempting to demoralize independent thinkers such as yourself. Don’t let them succeed. People want the truth.

Saker, wholeheartedly thank you.For me, if anything, you validated conclusions of the Asch experiment variation with presence of a “true partner”. Your thoughts in this blog helped me immensely in dealing with painful cognitive dissonance I experienced when my perception differed from the opinion of “majority”, as was presented in the news stream coming from the idiot-tube. Use of “was” is pertinent to my situation, since I’m TV free now. Thank you for that too.Cheers,Sasha

Just want to thank you Saker for being here and doing what you do, its incredibly important and may help prevent a catastrophe that many feel in the atmosphere but feel unable to prevent with all the incredible mind control technology in play today, but the splinter is still thereTo a shining soul ….. thank you!

Thanks for this heartening post and for the insight into the history of the blog.

It is important to know that we are everywhere. And you are making it possible that so many different people from all parts of the world with very different views come together.

Of course, you deserve every word of gratitude and support you receive from your readers. Your blog is an indispensable source of information. You write your articles not only from the point of view of military analysts, but also with much understanding for the people concerned. That makes it unique.

Dear Saker,I live in Europe,the matrix of all evils this planet has witnessed(and endure)of which Zusa is just a very linear prolonging .And I am Christian.But does that matter really?I found Ashura’s preachings of Sayed Hassan(before the current turmoil)much more Christian in essence or message than all the christian ones I heard these last thirty years,with a big focus on the Gift Of God ,Free Will.

I return to the metaphor of the desert, though not in a submarine or as one.

The Sheltering Sky, an exquisitely beautiful film by Bernardo Bertolucci. (Whom I regard as a great director).

It serves us the desert, the Sahara, and a lost American couple, whose journey to dark endings while in search for happiness through all the wrong means, playing tag with the devil and splitting into solitary souls—quite like a morality play offering no morals as the guidon.

Bertolucci, the master of cinema, also has a great political film, The Conformist. It too offers a solitary soul who thinks he can play with the Mussolini fascists and win.

Both films are moral explorations of the evil of banal existence without God, values and boundaries. But always the moral choice is possible.

Perfect for our time. Great cinema with Vittorio Storaro as cinematographer.(check out his Visions of Light documentary if you want to understand genius in color, light and shadow. (I worked on one of his films back in the day.)

To BCH at 21:22 I ask you to reconsider your promise and to come back into the comments thread. There’s another way to look at this. What if, rather than “wasting” Saker’s time by commenting, you save him some time by making a point that saves all of us some time? We never know when we may say the right thing that helps someone else.

As posted at 23:55, apparently Paul Craig Roberts doesn’t understand the value of a comments section, but I hope I do. What’s clear here is that everyone is trying to share information and perspective, not to win a point but to reach an intelligent, consensus view about what’s going on. That’s why we’re here, I think. And Saker’s comment threads are increasing in coherence, which is remarkable as they grow in size. A true network effect is in play. We are all concerned to sift out the trolls and the unhelpful attitudes and leave no one here except sincere seekers and theorizers working in a kind of peer-review structure towards agreement on the state of play and the nature of things.

It’s our own Asch conformity trial, it’s conscious and volitional and it’s open to everyone. It runs with its eyes open and all cards on the table. We are all the willing participants and we will come to agree on the correct analyses and decisions.

Saker I love the drawing of the bird – so reflective. The raptor, famed for its eyesight yet seeking meaning from the inward glance. Eyesight becomes insight.

I also think that we are in a very important time – I hate to use the word “pivotal” but it’s actually the right word. Many of us are seeing a lifetime of indoctrination vaporize in the red mist of the empire’s blood-lust. The truth shows itself. And 2014 will be for some people the year to remember when it happened that the incompetent lies could no longer cover the terrible actions. So we’re all here for that I suspect, in some degree or another.

You’ve set the theme in your article, and I think it’s an important one. The solitude of the individual researchers here gives way to the community of knowledge arising. Eventually this consensus adds to the intellectual ground for action, one of the kernels of movements that do things and form part of change. As this occurs, it’s crucial to be thinking right. So this is important work we all do here. I get that you didn’t “plan” any of it. But you are the good shepherd.

BTW, thank you for your contribution to the discussion on Sakers’ recent musings. As civilisation in the West falls into the abyss it hard to fathom what the future holds for peoples of the West.

The gay agenda has been very prominently pushed in Finland over the last few years and it is sad. That and the media furor over anything Russian and the drive for NATO membership. The paranoia being stirred up is sickening. To see and hear the effect of it on people around me saddens me so very much.

H, like you, I am recently returned to Australia country of my birth but not my home. The media in this country is beyond a joke, much like the antics of the little man who is the prime minister. Living the other side of the world and traveling quite extensively including in through Ukraine up till February this year and more recently Russia and Central Europe in the Summer, I can not comprehend the state of mind Australia is displaying.

Also what saddens me is that when discussing issues with my family, they will acknowledge there are issues afoot but they are totally in agreement with the lines being spewed forth in the media. It is like there is a massive disconnect between what they experience and see around them and then what they are fed by the media and their corresponding responses form as a result.They still believe things can be changed by the ballot and within the poisoned system in which they live. The divide and conquer system seems to also work well on their narratives of what is happening around them. Don’t bother talking about Islam or Muslims, every one of those must be terrorists.

I bow out of discussions with despair in my heart and soul. Within myself I hold to the belief that actions speak louder than words. That although things for the West will decline further in the near future, things will improve in the long term. There can not be any alternative as Corporate NeoFeudal System will destroy itself by it’s own nature.

The other response one can make to the society-wide Asch experiment is to withdraw inward, and eventually perhaps to commit suicide and thereby remove an unwanted element (one must be considerate of others, after all).

All this introspection started with the big rant yesterday. Leading to

“I just want you guys to stop murdering us”.

????so today it is Submarines in the Sahara. All of them screaming “stop killing us”.

If there’s enough people, the other persons’ “you guys” is sometime going to be YOU. Everyone feels the others are murdering him. If you’re always the victim you’re Israeli, if you’re never the victim your a 0.1% -er. Otherwise we need to somehow stay alive without killing anyone else.

A rant like yesterday’s bulldozes a lot of sand over a lot of little submarines which had NOT tried to kill you. Or anyone else that we know of. There is no AA meeting comparison unless it’s normal at AA meetings to bludgeon people with a baseball bat on arrival. Some of the catholics will be back; some of the gays probably won’t, they’ve been kicked in the teeth in real life often enough, just for being what they were born as. I am in tears for them.

Who’s next to be not quite human? blacks? disabled? gypsies? jews?

If my religion is “truer” than yours shall I force convert you? kill you? just keep you out of the good jobs? just make laws that force you to live by MY rules? Is my religion between me and God, a matter for my soul? or a way to lord it over others in this life? avenge myself for something that happened 800 years ago?

Does it have a “Do unto others” clause? a “Love thy neighbour” clause?

Society is ALL OF US. Voting doesn’t work???? if 90% turned up to vote instead of 20% it might. Society is ALL of us. Whatever society does to us, we did a little bit of it ourselves. THAT is the bit we can start to change. Let us get all those submarines off the sand. Let’s not murder them by careless kicking at the sand.

Don’t knows if this makes any sense or not. gotta go get sand out of the periscope.

I’ve recently read your site roughly daily for around six months. Before that I was aware of it, probably via your initial republication on Asia Times. But I only got really interested after the Maidan. I sensed some pretty obvious elisions and distortions in available media coverage, so I hooked into some other sites, amongst them yours, to gain a more comprehensive perspective.

Your site has been very informative on Ukraine, both on day-to-day events and in providing background material. It is also thought provoking and heartfelt, attributes which I value. You havedefinitely altered my initial view of Putin as “the unsavoury savior of Russia”. He hasdone good things for most Russians, but more importantly is a first class statesman.

Two questions:

1. Is your site one man’s musings on the world as he sees it (a blog), or is it something larger?

2. How do you universalise your message? Repeating simple religoius platitudes means that a lot of what you say makes a lot of sense to some, but a not a lot of sense to all.

Thank you Saker for sharing part of your life with us . I think many of us who raised their periscopes and became aware of how badly the world is perverted by the Anglo zionists , can say with gratitude that you have helped us raise them higher .

A very moving and beautiful exposition of your soul and background. Thanks a lot, Saker.

I donated only little, but wholeheartedly and intending to do so again; it wasn’t so little for my budget. But yet, please let me contribute my own view:

IT NEVER OCCURRED to me to think of myself as the generous and kind one and you the lucky one. You do a lot of work, and it just felt both fair and “self-serving” to enable you continue, – both “physically” (“buying” you more time) AND morally (you won’t think we aren’t appreciative of what get here).

You see, all this reminds me of all the puzzling and futile dispute that is going on around the presumed alternative hypotheses of Putin being either a “savior for the world” or “just” a strong, honest, gifted … defendor of his country’s interests.

I have always hold that it is exactly BY HIM DEFENDING his country’s (real) interests (and pursuing conservative approaches that have been abandoned wantonly and recklessly abandoned by the West) Putin IS DOING a service to the whole of mankind, in the process.

The West is betraying their country’s and people’s real best interests in order to arrive at this ultra-rivalry-drenched world view that so many people have imbued and force-fed to their souls as the natural one. It isn’t. Just like in economics where they foster this ruinous rat-race, dog-eats-dog competition in order to exempt their own sinecure from being challenged, to make up for the void of competition at the level where it most matters. Just like in philosophy where Darwinism is the way to govern for the one most parasitic nation which has the cheek to call itself “the indispensable one”.

But outside of the diabolic, and within the Godly realm, truly, morally self-serving acts and benevolent ones are no innate contradictions to each other.

(And by the way, I don’t think you are just an average guy, either. The remarkable thing with you, I think, is your honesty. That’s what drives contrarian people crazy. That’s what allows the “submarines” to recognize themselves as such an vent their rage. You are NO “war-profiteer”, in any sense worthy of contempt.)

Greetings from Singapore:Being a ‘submarine in the desert’ could be seen -negatively- as being over geared/skilled in a poor/desolate environment. Wrong!. You are out of the matrix and all the illusions/delusions are seen as ‘sand’. Enjoy your symptom! You are free to create your own reality and/or find many other ‘submarines’ and jointly deconstruct the matrix for others and for you.RgdsMario Medjeral

Hi Saker, I always felt like a fish out of water, I would talk to the “sheeple” as I like to call them as they are happy to be led around and not want to know what’s happening in this great big world. Fantastic piece you have written that a lot of grounded submariners can relate to. Thanks again.

I am always weary of people taking money having my own viewpoints. I am never sure of alternate agenda. It is also very easy to get into a slippery slop of changing your views to those of large donators. This was very apparent with antiwar since they came up as an alternate media but then started asking for huge sums to pay their contributors. Now I do think contributors do need to get to paid something or they would not be able to survive. But sites that came up as viewpoints different than MSM suddenly wanting to become the new source to replace the government media are in effect making money on the peace dividend. We see this even with the red cross and human rights organizations where some people get paid more than the leaders of alternate organizations. Heck even supposedly charities are these days a for profit venture. You can never be sure that if you donate you are not paying for someone’s yacht instead of the needy. So I feel that if I have the need to help others, I can do it locally in my own community after all, there are no places on the planet without needy and under privileged.

People like pepe travel a lot to get the stories and he would not be able to do it without getting paid. Or others who have large following and need dedicated servers and maintenance people who keep the sites up. I give people a chance.. So I dont make judgments right away. I still read antiwar but not very often. But I do watch for pepe’s article because he was one of the few who mentioned OBL’s last words and said he was on his way to interview him, which never happened as I think OBL died right around then.The actual Pakistani reporter who published the interview disappeared soon as well. Just like carlos the airtraffic controller in kiev.

I would say this, dont let the money go to your head. It is easy to start making a lot of money as we can see by the sheer number of think tanks around and the influence they have. Once you start doing things for money you become a professional and then it is your job and not your belief’s that matter. None of us are right all the time or even most of the time because reality is in the eyes of the beholder. If your soul is eternal and there are a multitudes of universes and dimensions, even you would not know where you are at any point in time. But you can believe and tell others the truth of your observations as best you can. Which is all what one can do.

I once told [to Eustace Mullins] how much respect I had for George Orwell’s daring to write 1984 — to which he sharply replied: “It’s a great piece of pro-government propaganda — they win in the end.” Mr. Mullins is of course right: Orwell’s Big Brother is always one step ahead, almost omniscient — and therefore invincible.– Beatrice Mott. This Difficult Individual Eustace Mullins — and the Remarkable Ezra Pound. March 20, 2010 http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Mott-Mullins.html#R

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